I have a few theories of how I’m going to die: slowly, painfully, of cancer. Struck down in a traffic accident [as anyone who has ever seen me cross a road will agree with 100%]. A mugging gone wrong. [Trigger happy people abound].

But this is the year 2019, Syria and Iraq are still smouldering, the horrors of war are still emerging, and here, in Pakistan, one is now apparently waiting for war. To be struck down. For trigger-happy men to make decisions about the lives of millions of people. We do not have the right to choose our own deaths, to even plan for a future. Even that right has been stripped away. Every 2, 5, 10 years, I am reminded that choosing a future is a luxury. It is not a right. That the future is reduced to merely waiting, waiting for the big flash in the sky, for death.

On a recent summer afternoon in Lahore, Abdul Qayyum placed naan from the tandoor onto a basket, ready for collection. The Khalifa Naan Shop is opposite the Wazir Khan Mosque in Lahore, a gloriously beautiful mosque that in recent years has become a favorite with Lahore’s moneyed couples as a backdrop for wedding portraits. The naan shop, according to its listing on Google Maps, has been around since 1869. “It’s been at least fifty years working here for us,” Qayyum said. “It’s very old,” said another worker. “A hundred years old.” They make naan stuffed with keema or chicken, roghni naan and plain naan. They make naan all year around. “Its the kind of thing that is eaten every day,” Qayyum said, as the sky began to turn grey. The shop opens at 9 a.m. every day and closes at 2 in the morning. The time doesn’t matter: People buy food from all over, Qayyum says. They know which shop sells the best tikkas, which one has the best naan.

How has the neighborhood changed in the last fifty years?

“At that time, things were different. These naans -- you could get five for four annas. Now each naan is ten rupees. Then the salary was 40 rupees a month. Now its 150 a day. it’s the expense. Things are so expensive. Flour is more expensive. The environment.... everything has changed. Now a new Pakistan is about to be made. We’ve seen the old one, now lets see the new one.”

If you’ve ever owned a TV in Pakistan, you might have also owned/encountered/been told to dust a TV trolley.

What is a TV trolley? It is the fancier iteration of the stationary shelved TV ‘rack’ and the wood glass-fronted cabinet to place the TV on. But the TV trolley was really the same cabinet but on wheels. It held the VCR, the VCR ‘cleaner’ tape – a scam if there ever was one – the protective plastic cover for the VCR, and the selection of video cassettes you were lucky enough to own / “forgot” to return to the video rental shop, and the TV rested atop it this edifice. Despite the wheels, the TV – and the trolley – was/is never really mobile and is usually restricted to one vantage viewing point, only ever moving if you moved house (revealing the rusty wheels’ marks on the floor) or when the TV had to be sent off for repairs (99% of the time there’s always something wrong with the ‘tube’.)

TV trolleys, as it turns out, are also dangerous. According to this study, of the 55 kids taken to a Karachi hospital ER because of injuries caused by falling objects – 40% were injured by TV trolleys (!!!). 71.4% of the 55 were admitted to the ICU, and the most common injuries were to the upper limb and head -- leading the researchers to conclude that injuries caused by falling TV trolleys were an important home safety issue in Pakistan.

(Even though I’ve never owned a flat screen and abhor TV trolleys I have been unable to KonMari them out of the house. I have tried. They remain, rusty wheels and all.)